ON THE IDEA OF "EUROPEAN UNITY"

...France is a case in point...

...aside JEAN BLOCH-MICHEL from someone with special interests—cheesemongers, stockbreeders, fishermen, or grain farmers—the average man does not feel involved...

...The Europe they envisaged was to be unified around the Christian Democratic movement—then in power in France, Belgium, Germany, and Italy— and which drew on the progressive Catholic movements of the late-19th and early-20th centuries...

...Centralizing vs...

...Whether technocracy has a "soul" is a question I would not venture to discuss...

...But in countries where it is still administered—France is one —very few statesmen are courageous enough to challenge the powerful attachment the popular unconscious exhibits for this archaic punishment...

...Yet who in Europe today is capable of disengaging himself from bourgeois ideologies or the Marxist litany (not from Marxism) to discover and attempt to apply a form of democracy suitable for a union of states and nations...

...Other referenda took place...

...The average European finds it hard enough to feel he has any responsibility for, and therefore should concern himself with, what goes on in his own country...

...In our situation today it is comical...

...Ireland voted yes...

...For good measure, the anti-Slovenian Austrian nationalists seized upon the occasion of a visit by Chancellor Bruno Kreisky to their area to organize a demonstration in 100-percent Nazi style, during which one heard again anti-Jewish slogans...

...Concrete has exigencies that are stronger than national traditions...

...One does not live, eat, and drink in France as one does in England, Germany, or Italy...

...I do not believe that: I consider it was the very worst way of coping with the problem...

...The defeat of France, the defeat of Germany, the obliteration of the free nations of Central and Eastern Europe, and the collapse of the French and British colonial empires dealt profound blows to nationalist sentiment...

...And no more could we have foreseen the influence Enoch Powell would wield in England, or Franz Josef Strauss in Germany...

...The founding fathers understood this...

...Still, developments in 1940, 1945, and later, cruelly belied the beliefs of European nationalists...

...The unreasonable but satisfying position—satisfying in the sense that it compensated for past humiliations—was for France to proclaim herself a great power, an indestructible entity, never to be assimilated into any other community because of characteristics eternally peculiar to herself...

...What's more, they think that with this move they can escape from the status of an underdeveloped country, to which British policy has reduced 466 them...

...There is a strong possibility that this JEAN BLOCH-MICHEL democratic expression will assume a form different from current ones...

...By nature, nationalism seems to have a centralizing effect, yet the growing weight of centralized bureaucracies has brought about a fragmentation of nationalism...

...The moment there is talk of doing away with it, you hear the same wornout arguments ("a field day for murderers...

...This pseudo-Marxism will lead only to disillusionment...

...I might add that if he thinks this way, he does so not out of self-interest or blindness...

...When one Michelin shop in France stopped work and halted production, the workers in Michelin's German and Dutch factories refused to increase their production, as they had been asked to do, in order to avoid weakening the bargaining position of their French comrades...

...Not that such feelings should be denied a measure of justification...

...The concept of "nationhood" was born in Europe...

...Yes, England has joined the Common Market...

...The rest of the world was conceived as a series of markets on the frontiers of Europe...

...It is against this background that we must consider the problem of the Europe of the Nine...

...I do not believe one can see in this positive response any Europeanism whatever...

...Translated by ADRIENNE FOULKE q ON THE IDEA OF "EUROPEAN UNITY" 469...

...Adenauer was also well placed to recognize the difficulties created by the fact of belonging to a disputed and sometimes divided community...

...but also implicit in the proposal was the risk of making Europe the "best weapon" in the Cold War...

...But it was not the signing of this or that treaty, not this or that summit meeting, not the "historic" entry of Great Britain into the Common Market...

...The broader genre of "fatherland" nationalism has been encouraged, I think, by what ON THE IDEA OF "EUROPEAN UNITY" seems to me the chief error committed by the early partisans of a united Europe...

...This standardization of life by no means guarantees understanding and peace, because it is unaccompanied by a unification of structures, not to speak of loyalties...

...If someone had told us in our twenties that in 1972 we would still have to listen to Debre shouting "We are nationalists...

...At the moment, only one movement seems to me capable of this imaginative effort— syndicalism as it has newly developed, and notably in France with the CFDT (the federation of Christian trade unions...

...Yet when one is dealing with beliefs that have little or nothing to do with reason, the believer who finds his beliefs threatened clings to them even more urgently...

...But what does seem to threaten us all today is that our ways of life will be uniformly Americanized—one reason being that the American way of life is adapted to an economic and social situation toward which we are all heading...

...Two other and surprising phenomena have occurred that, on the surface, are contradictory...

...It assumes that if we were to put ourselves in the keeping of this "soulless technocracy," we would be sacrificing the democratic processes whereby the decisions that concern us most closely are made...

...It is equally plausible that industrial concentrations, which have already begun to appear, will be more and more capable of ignoring frontiers and even, some day, of achieving a body of European corporation law or a regulatory code on behalf of European firms, and that these measures will favor the growth of our economies by permitting their rhythm to be more easily controlled...

...The reasonable one was to consider herself a second-class power and act accordingly...

...Irish nationalists think that by joining a united Europe they may be able to break away from the confrontation with Great Britain...

...Recently I was no less astonished to read in Austrian papers that the residents of Carinthia, led by the mayors of their villages, had rebelled against a government proposal that road signs carry the names of their villages in both German and Slovenian, since a substantial minority of Slovenes live in the area...

...For years nationalist opposition to a united Europe has offered the thesis that the destiny of individual nations must not be entrusted to a "soulless technocracy...

...It is not impossible that the spectacle provided by European rivalries during the dollar crisis will lead nations to take measures to limit the divergencies between their monetary policies, although such measures can only be artificial so long as foreign economic, social, and even political policies are not in accord...

...In our French papers, we read daily protests against the encroachments of an administration that increasingly eludes control...

...Memories of the Nazi experience were still fresh enough to open the way to every kind of propaganda appeal ("Our soldiers under the command of German generals...

...In time it would also bring about a power complex capable of counterbalancing the two big powers, Russia and the U.S...

...The danger is the belief that standardization will lead to unity and that little by little, thanks to the machinery of the Common Market, the monetary guarantees, and Euratom (the European Atomic Energy Community), political Europe will be self-built, as it were, by virtue of the principle which states that superstructures are conditioned by infrastructures...

...It was like the old dilemma of the chicken and the egg: was this reawakening caused by the failures of European politics, or were the failures of European politics caused by this reawakening...

...None of the three men foresaw the rebirth of nationalism...

...I have traveled a great deal in Europe in these last years, and what has struck me the most is that all cities look alike...

...The Lorrainer came from a province that had become German in 1870, had reverted to being French in 1918, became German again in 1940 and, finally, French once more in 1944...

...centralization and the struggle against centralization...

...Nor is the uniformity of superstructures: medieval Christian Europe endured for several centuries on the foundation of shared ideas and beliefs, yet her people, who were living in very similar socioeconomic situations, never stopped tearing each other apart...

...So today uniformity of superstructures will not suffice to create unity...

...Such considerations come to the fore in the campaign...

...This is not just a little joke...

...They reflect stonewall attitudes that crime statistics and the certitudes of psychology or physiology may never unsettle...

...But, in this connection, it must be pointed out that one does not live, eat, and drink in Normandy as one does in the Provence, or in Wales as in Scotland, or in Piedmont as in Sicily...

...Even what we eat is commencing to taste the same everywhere: today chicken has the same taste—and it is an indifferent taste—in all countries because everywhere poultry is fed the same diet...

...In my view, it would be hazardous to say...

...All nine nations are subject to the centripetal and centrifugal pressures of nationalism and the struggle against nationalism...

...And even the sauce is no longer of any help...

...Norway voted no...

...As for decisions that affect the future of Europe, these, he feels, are arrived at far away from him...

...But this technocracy disregards the fact that every nation in Europe is governed today almost exclusively by a technocracy...

...It is also the thinking that a man such as Michel Debre invokes whenever he speaks up with his almost demented stubbornness and the brand of nominalism that often characterizes irrational policies: by dint of speaking of what does not exist, one will force that of which one speaks to come into existence...

...the fear that somehow the provisos of the Common Market would force the British public to feed on frogs and sauer kraut...

...Those workers allowed us to witness what was perhaps the first manifestation of European solidarity...

...The opponents of Great Britain's entry into a unified Europe were mistaken: there is little danger they will see their country Frenchified...

...the notion that the nice cup of tea would soon disappear, together with warm ale and the boiled joint with mint sauce, their place preempted by rivers of red wine and Pernod and a garlic-laden cuisine—all these things mattered, not to mention problems still more serious like adoption of the metric system and giving up driving on the left...

...In other circumstances, this contention could be taken seriously...

...This is only one of many signs of the mounting difficulty parliamentary systems are encountering as they seek to adapt to industrial and, even more, to a postindustrial civilization...

...This uniformity is dictated by the fact that all, or nearly all, the countries of Europe are obeying the technical imperatives of postindustrial civilization, and this is manifest equally in architecture, in the excessive growth of cities, in pollution, and in an expanding "soulless technocracy...

...FOR MEN of the Left who belong to my generation— men who became politically aware in the 1930s—this rebirth of nationalism is cause for astonishment...

...Although the first European community they founded was economic in nature, they all insisted that the unification of Europe must be political in nature, and thus they paid unconscious tribute to Maurras's slogan "the political first," to which perhaps too little importance has been attached because his politics were not our politics...

...o ne can say that European uniformity, if not European unification, is being created by the impact of things—identical expressways with their identical motels where spurious "local specialties" strive feebly to give you a sense of place...

...My comparison will perhaps be deemed frivolous, but the campaign waged by the British adversaries of a united Europe reminded me of the endless discussions for or against the death penalty...

...No government of an advanced country concedes that capital punishment is of the slightest value, either as an example or a deterrent...

...Competition had been one of the causes of both world conflicts...

...It was, Le Monde declared, a heterogeneous coalition of "leftists, nationalists, farmers, and partisans of a return to nature," to which one should add all those who depend for their livelihood on the fishing industry and have no wish to see French, English, or German fleets in their territorial waters...

...They visualized what was essentially a political community ideal...

...In other words, the day when we see the birth of a political Europe that is the democratic expression of the ensemble of citizens who compose it...

...decentralizing na tionalism—today, in almost all of Europe, whether East or West—is the form assumed in a development that, in varying degrees of intensity, appears in Brittany as well as Ireland, the Basque country and Flanders, in Croatia as well as the Ukraine...

...Those who urged an EDC claimed that German rearmament within EDC would be the lesser evil...

...We have learned long ago to recognize the importance of superstructures, but we realize that uniformity in living is not necessarily a sign of unified life...

...As these founding fathers visualized it, a united Europe must be not so much an economic as a moral and political power, and it must demonstrate that, thanks to Christian Democracy, it is possible to transcend fraternal quarrels between nations...

...it is a fact of great importance...

...In France, the movement toward decentralization, which in certain respects may be justified, is linked with a spirit of regionalism not without its dangers...

...The concept was so potent that neither French JEAN BLOCH-MICHEL nor German socialists were able to rid them selves of it...

...We French have the impression that what takes place in America or in Germany concerns us more directly...

...We may finally discover that an English-style parliamentarianism or an American-style presidential system will be overtaken by history...

...Similarly, the Communist party, whether in power, as in the U.S.S.R., or in opposition, as in France, constantly involved nationalism...

...Such experiences suggest why these men formulated a concept of a united Europe that differed from the ideas that first inspired Jean Monnet...

...The French referendum was favorable but no resounding endorsement of European unity...

...But had the decision to join been submitted to a referendum, there is little doubt the response would have been negative...

...So it was that in Great Britain the most telling arguments against joining a united Europe were those that arose from ancient depths of the popular consciousness or unconscious...

...They found ready justification for leaving out those two land's ends of Europe, Anglican England and Protestant Prussia...

...THE EXISTENCE of an entity called "Europe" has been surrounded by indifference on the part of Europeans, except for the few years following immediately upon its birth...

...Some ten years ago, I attended a meeting of the Occitan Pen Club (presently there will be founded, and why not, a Basque and a Breton Pen Club), where I heard young writers from the French Midi talk, in the same tone Algerian writers once would have used, about the colonial oppression inflicted upon them...

...However, none of this will make a Montedison or Renault worker, a Beauce farmer, or a Scottish sheepgrower feel more European...

...Were I asked if an unchallengeably European development has taken place in the last two decades, I would answer yes...

...The three political fathers of the idea of a United Europe—Robert Schuman, Konrad Adenauer, and Alcide de Gasperi—had each experienced excesses of nationalism that made them sense the urgency of devising a political solution for nationalistic confrontations...

...the implication is that major decisions would in that case be taken by "bureaucrats" operating without "democratic control...

...For more than a century—from the French Revolution to World War 11—it nourished and inspired political action...

...The only people showing a modicum of heat have been opponents of Great Britain's entry into the community of Europe...

...If this statement was irrefutable 50 years ago, today it must be ever so slightly tempered: in all these places one drinks Coca-Cola...

...The one passion, however, that has been aroused in Europe is the fervor of anti-Europeans...

...Yet this is how things stand...

...it was the most recent Michelin strike...

...Insular feelings were aroused: the taste for a traditional particularism...

...It was their proposal that the Coal and Steel Community be followed by a second common endeavor—the European Defense Community...

...468 So the danger Europe faces today is not standardization, to which our civilization itself may actually condemn us...

...De Gasperi had represented his province in the Austrian Diet under Franz Josef, and subsequently was elected to the Italian Parliament...

...The day they learned that their German and Dutch comrades were sharing in their fight or, at least, doing nothing to hinder it, those several dozen workers in a Clermont-Ferrand factory perhaps felt themselves to be Europeans...

...I defy the traveler who arrives unexpectedly in a strange city to say, without looking at the color of the sky or listening ON THE IDEA OF "EUROPEAN UNITY" 467 to people speak, whether he has reached Bucharest or Munich or Athens or Naples or Belgrade...

...Schuman was a Lorrainer, de Gasperi came from the Trentino, and Adenauer was a Rhinelander...

...Defeated in 1940, owing her liberation only to the Allies (her armed forces and the Resistance could, at best, save no more than "honor"), and then losing her colonial empire, France had two options...

...People who elected this position were, as I well remember, disdainfully told, "In a word, you want France to become like Switzerland...

...I can imagine that, in a general way, business will be conducted in the future on a European scale, and that Mercedes, Citroen, Fiat, and Daimler, the producers of wine in the French Midi, and the producers of Danish butter and German beer will find themselves in a new and more or less favorable situation that will have developed directly from the machinery of the Common Market...

...resurrecting the watchword of the fascist movements we used to battle in the Latin Quarter—we certainly would not have believed it...

...Yet our nationalists give it scant attention...

...He has good reasons for being much more interested in what happens in American or German elections than in what happens between Pompidou and his eight Market partners...

...they would receive a sustained political education that would help them develop in the desired direction...

...We are all attached to our given ways of living...

...464 I should add that for these men a united Europe meant a Catholic Europe (Catholic, not merely Christian...

...that ideal is as absent from the minds of the Norwegian voters who said no as it is from the minds of the Irish or Danish voters who said yes...

...However, the dual opposition of nationalists and Communists doomed the initiative in advance...

...Encirclingsmothering— a historical core that now is no more than picturesque, a kind of local-architecture museum, our cities are everywhere the same...

...Whatever happens to the European community— whether it remains embryonic (i.e., economic) or is transformed into a true sociopolitical entity—it has already embarked in a direction that must lead toward an end no longer entirely of our choosing...

...Monnet, because of his experience in two world wars, took as his point of departure economic facts that to him seemed obvious: the economies of the European nations are fated to be at once competitive and complementary...

...Europe will exist the day when it is created by men, not by governments or business enterprises...

...If the nations of Europe want to survive, they must move beyond their present national structures and their reliance on alliances...

...A rapid review of the events of 1972 is enough to persuade one that, while nationalistic ideas flourish, there is still no such thing as a European mentality or any popular dedication to Europeanism...

...At the time American policy aimed at rearming Germany, no matter what the cost, in order to contain—if not one day repulse— the ambitions of Stalinist Russia...

...This argument derives from a way of thinking one would place back in the time of Barres, Maurras, and the Chambre Bleu Horizon...

...Peace in Europe could be achieved only through such an economic community...